


The Book of Ruth

by racketghost



Series: Strange Moons [8]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Armageddon, Comfort Sex, Emotional Baggage, First Time Dreamin', Hurt Aziraphale (Good Omens), Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Literal Sleeping Together, M/M, Medical Procedures, Only Frances McDormand Can Judge Me, Rimming, Suicidal Thoughts, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2019-11-14
Packaged: 2021-01-30 08:00:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21424858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/racketghost/pseuds/racketghost
Summary: No, he is not sure— not entirely— why he is here. He cannot say whether it was the incredibly obvious way that Crowley cheated on their coin toss or the look in his eye when he realized where he was going, the way he put on his glasses and the way his shoulders hitched a little higher up to his ears.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Strange Moons [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1480787
Comments: 136
Kudos: 661





	The Book of Ruth

**Author's Note:**

> bless all of you kind souls who leave comments and kudos. I love you all. 
> 
> also: this is the prequel to my short lil story called Classical Mechanics. All of my stories thus far exist in the same universe because I'm tacky and self-referential like that.
> 
> ————  
Please be aware that I am using the “creator chose not to use archive warnings” for this piece and that it may include distressing imagery and difficult subject matter. Please avoid if you are sensitive to themes surrounding character death and suicide ♥️

and I've got no illusions about you,

and guess what? I never did. 

and when I said-- 

when I said I'll take it

I mean, I meant as is. 

—“as is”, Ani Difranco

Megiddo, September 1918

_Intreat me not to leave thee_.

He can not say, not with any degree of certainty, why he is here. He can not say why he has come all the way from London, from his comfortable bookshop and the new misprinted Bible some kind soul had dropped off, to this great wide desert. He can not say why he is climbing this sloping rocky hill, the red dust of the desert floor sweeping up onto his pale medic uniform.

He can not say why he felt a strange magnetic pull in his chest, why it guided him here against himself, why he felt a sudden grip of fear that he could not ignore.

_Or to return from following after thee_.

The words have a pleasant rhythm, a familiar cadence. He has said them before, many times, has turned them over in his head enough that they’ve become musical in the retelling, a hymnal.

He also cannot say for certain exactly _when_ he began reciting it to himself, or precisely why. But he guesses that it was sometime in the 1700s, when the Jacobite rebellion was in full swing and Crowley was off seemingly every month for many years, on horseback, covered in mud.

Aziraphale blinks, stepping over dusty rocks, and remembers the striking image of Crowley wearing a kilt.

_—For wither thou goest_—

He has always thought that Crowley’s tartan back then had looked strikingly similar to the one he wore on his bow-tie. But he had not mentioned it then and he has not since.

_I will go_.

The words in his head are a timepiece to climb mountains to, a metronome keeping him steady on the shifting sands underfoot.

A chalky pebble skips out from under his shoe and tumbles down the rock face to the great Valley of Jazreel below. He can hear it plinking off of boulders and wonders why he has climbed so high.

Aziraphale does not like to think about falling.

He stops and stands near the edge, looks out over the wide desert. There are armies out along the horizon, making their steady approach to this hallowed plain. Crowley is amongst them, he knows, blessing the calvary of the Australian army, miracling their water-skins to never run dry.

_And where thou lodgest—_

No, he is not sure— not entirely— why he is here. He cannot say whether it was the incredibly obvious way that Crowley cheated on their coin toss or the look in his eye when he realized where he was going, the way he put on his glasses and the way his shoulders hitched a little higher up to his ears.

_I will lodge._

He has been here before, of course. They both have. This stretch of desert that the humans call _Via Maris_— the Way to the Sea— has been watered with the blood of millions since the dawn of time. There have been innumerable battles here spanning the centuries, all of them populated by men believing themselves on the right side, fighting beneath the true banner of heaven.

_Together to the place called in Hebrew, Armageddon_.

This isn’t it, he knows— _not yet_— but it still unnerves him, pulls the hair off his neck to stand on end.

Yes, they’ve both been here. And they will be again someday.

He swallows and tries not to think about it.

He tries to think instead about how the word itself, _Armageddon_, is just a mashed up portmanteau, a made up thing. That it has no inherent power. That it comes simply from the Greek name for the place, _har Megiddo_, _har_ meaning hill.

_It’s just a hill_, he thinks, looking up the long slope of golden sand to his left, _just a hill_.

But he cannot escape the echoing of Ruth in the back of his mind, the last line of the verse that he so very often ignores because it does not fit his narrative, does not align itself with his naivety.

_And where thou diest, I will die._

* * *

There are a few peculiar things that happen when hundreds of horses begin galloping over sand.

First, the individual grains begin popping up from the earth in a frantic sort of dance, as if the earth itself was somehow hot and they were trying desperately to avoid touching it. Then there is a strangely familiar sound that reaches the ears— a din that is not unlike the cadence of distant thunder, the rhythmic pattering of rain on rooftops. And then finally, if the sun is shining and there are not too many clouds in the sky, the vibrating image of horses will appear like a mirage on the horizon line, a terrifying and shimmering collective beast, the image mirrored down into the molten sand.

Aziraphale can see that the long lines of the palm fronds above him are vibrating too, can see the way that they bounce with the fury of the oncoming cavalry.

The echo of horses is growing louder, he can hear over the wide plain the thunderous exhalations of their breath, the yawping of their riders. The single collective animal on the horizon is separating into single riders a hundred men deep, the mirrored image of their bodies on the sand evaporating with proximity.

Aziraphale tucks himself down near a great boulder, eyes scanning the riders for one in particular— one with red hair and pale skin and freckles across his cheeks like stars in the night sky—And then there are the sudden pops of gunfire as they come within range of each other, the final percussive smash of horse against human body, swords against bayonets.

He should know by now the way that battles go— how they evolve across the earth, splay out in directions they did not plan to go. He watches as the center of it moves away from him, as the eye of the conflict swings out from the valley and into the open desert.

He catches a glimpse of a body there amid the rioting mass, clothed in black, on a pale horse. The horse looks wild, _feral_ even, more terrified by whatever is on his back than what is happening around him.

Aziraphale stands abruptly, walks mindlessly toward the fray.

The Egyptian Expeditionary Force is clothed in the khaki cotton of the British military— the Australian cavalry too. They ride, for the most part, Arabian horses that reflect the blinding brightness of the sun off of their white coats.

The Ottoman army is rugged and resilient in their dark uniforms, on their sure-footed ponies of every color, lances in hand, decorated with tassels and brilliant pops of color.

Aziraphale looks between them— dark versus light, and stops where he stands, the world swaying beneath him.

_This isn’t it_, he tells himself, _it’s not_.

But it feels like it.

The earth is shuddering beneath his feet, the sand greedily soaking up the blood spilled from horse and man alike, hungry for tribute. He keeps catching glimpses of a black figure amongst the masses, has an overwhelming, instinctive desire to pull it out like a loose thread on a jacket.

He moves toward the battle again, walking close enough to reach the men scattered dead on the outskirts of the fray, horses wheezing into the sand. He stoops and quiets a gelding— heals the broken leg.

“All is well,” he whispers to the blinking terrified eye, rubbing a hand on the downy nose, “you’re going to be okay.”

There is what Aziraphale perceives to be a grateful snort in reply.

“Get out of here,” he says, “go be a wild thing.”

The ears flick back and forth, and then the gelding is rising to his feet, the no-longer broken leg pawing at the ground as if in equine disbelief.

Aziraphale dips his hand into the sand, watches as the horse gallops away from the battle beside them. He feels dazed, rooted in place by something magnetic about the earth here.

He lifts his fingers and watches the grains of sand roll off of them, remembers a desert once— not too long ago— how it felt to cradle a demon in his arms.

He stands and tries to find his bearing here, amidst the confusion, the dark versus light. He isn’t sure what Crowley is doing, if he is fighting at all in that mass of man and beast, gun and sword, or if he is just causing low level panic— agitating the horses into a state of confusion and terror, forcing the blades to stick in their scabbards, preventing the reloading of pistols.

There is a brief moment where their eyes find each other— Crowley’s glasses having been lost at some point and him not seeming to care— and a voice that seems embossed into his bones rises up out of his body, sounding in his head.

_His eyes were as a flame of fire and on his head were many crowns, and he had a name written that no man knew but he himself_.

He knows who the words are about, knows them because he was created to know them, to spread them like wildflower seeds across the plains of the earth. But he knows too about other eyes that are like a flame of fire, a head with hair that shines like a metal diadem, a name written that no one knows except himself and maybe God.

_But I know his name_— he thinks wildly, the moment of their connected gazes stretching across seconds. Of course he knows his name— _Crowley_, yes, but first it had been _Crawly_, a name given to him by the other demons, apparently— and before that… before that…

_What was his angelic name?_

Aziraphale pauses, blinks, and feels something biting his leg. He does not look away to see what it is.

Crowley looks alarmed, across the field, as if in slow-motion, underwater. The dark covering over his head falls away to reveal hair the color of copper— that metal diadem— blinding in the midday sun.

Aziraphale stares at him, the dark figure with the red hair and the pale skin and the freckles that are like stars across the night sky— and remembers, all at once, that he is the great serpent of Eden.

It is as if ice water has been poured into his veins, slicking his bloodstream, a chill racing up the back of his neck. He has the sudden understanding of why he was drawn here, of why the tide of his blood flowed out and pulled him to this place, with Crowley, with a gravitational power that could only be a part of some plan greater than himself.

He thinks of carrying Crowley across a desert not so dissimilar to this one, thinks of holding him down with just one hand on his hip— the way that hip felt like a bird-bone beneath his fingers, enthralled by the way Crowley was so easily malleable beneath his hands, delicate and spindly despite his prickly exterior— _you’re a soft thing too, aren’t you_?— and then all at once the images invert: because this field where they are standing will be, someday, the place where it all happens, the place where their story together will end. It will end here in this desert, between these red-chalk hills, and the sand will suck up the blood of not horses and human men but Crowley, demons, angels, maybe Aziraphale himself.

_No_, he thinks, _not mine_.

Not him because he is stronger, more resilient, blessed by the hand of God herself. Not him, he knows, because when the time comes he knows what will happen— he knows what will happen because he knows by heart the ending of the world, the sundered time, can quote the lines from the book of it like they are written on his skin, like he was birthed between the letters of it.

He knows, for instance, that when the time comes he will find Crowley here, will wrestle him away from the other angels who all desire to vanquish the great serpent of Eden, and will drag him apart from the battle. He will drag him up these hills— _har_ meaning hill, he thinks_— _and find a patch of brush that has been dried in the desert air. And he will ask Crowley to light it with a bit of the hellfire that he carries with him, that he carries inside of him. And of course Crowley will do it, not knowing, not understanding, not needing to understand because he has always done whatever Aziraphale asks, has always bent to his desires despite the consequences for himself.

And while they are up there, watching Heaven and Hell have the great prophesized dance that they have always wanted, they will hold each other in their arms in full view— like they have always wanted— and press their mouths together— like they have always wanted— and live for the small eternities between heartbeats, shore up enough love to last them wherever they are going.

And when the battle beneath them is finally giving way and the watchful eye of Heaven turns her gaze upon them up on that hilltop, _har_ just meaning hill, with the bush beside them still burning with hellfire, Aziraphale will hold Crowley tight to his chest, and whisper his affection, and squeeze until the fire in his eyes goes out. And then, with all of Heaven watching, he will kiss that star-freckled forehead, and lay him down with reverence onto that red-chalk hill, and step into the fire that Crowley lit, let himself be burnt into ash.

Not him, he knows, _not me_— and then he sinks to his knees in the golden sand, the sun a sort of withering halo in the sky, backlighting Crowley across the flat plain of earth.

_I saw an angel come down from heaven_ _having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on that old serpent—_

Aziraphale looks down and can see a curious red tide blooming across his left thigh. He cards his hands through the sand, ignoring the gunfire and the screaming horses, feeling very little of anything.

It is warm here and the sun is relentless, relentless, hot across his face even at this low angle— but he feels as though he is back at Verdun, with Crowley’s arm beneath his fingers, his body folded into the corner of that couch in his office.

_“‘_ _I beg of you that you would. If the time ever came— I’d rather it be you._ _’”_

_It will be, my darling_, he thinks, and watches the grains fall between his fingers, _It will be._

It feels like someone is calling his name but he isn’t entirely certain-- watching with muted fascination at the way the sand beneath his legs is turning dark, _wet_.

_Intreat me not to leave thee—_

“Aziraphale.”

_Or to return from following after thee._

“_Angel_.”

_For wither thou goest_

“Fucking answer me, _angel_.”

_I will go_.

* * *

He is being dragged.

Aziraphale peels open his eyes, can see a battle still raging somewhere far behind him, the sun a low crimson circle in the sky.

There are elbows crooked into the junction of his arm and torso, his legs skidding off of the sand beneath him.

He feels very dizzy, _tired_— a physical symptom he very rarely encounters, and also hungry, a physical symptom he very often does.

He turns his head and stares at the arms that are holding him up, that are dragging him backwards across the sand. He knows without question who they belong to— he can recognize the constellation of Orion on his forearm.

“Crowley,” he says, and his voice sounds odd to his own ears.

“Angel?”

The hands drop him, set him down so he is sitting upright on the ground. The out-of-focus face of Crowley comes swimming into view.

“_Angel_,” he says, and Aziraphale can see that he hasn’t replaced his glasses. He smiles into the golden eyes, happy to see them.

“What the _fuck_, Aziraphale, _why _are you here?”

He opens his mouth to speak but his throat feels raw. Crowley pulls away, digging around in the bag slung across his chest.

“_Drink_,” he says, and lifts a canteen to his lips.

The water balms his sore throat, and he coughs.

“I don’t know,” he admits.

“You don’t know why you followed me?”

Crowley still has the greenish-purple color of a black eye outlined on his cheek, a darkened semi-circle underneath his right eye.

“Why are you dragging me?” Aziraphale asks, ignoring his question.

“Because of _this_ you ridiculous angel,” he says, looking pointedly down at his lap.

Aziraphale looks too, at that spot where he thought something had bitten him, at that red stain that had appeared on his clothes. Crowley has tied something— a belt, he realizes, around his upper thigh, stymying the flow of blood.

“Good tourniquet technique,” Aziraphale mutters.

“_Good tourniquet technique_? Aziraphale we are in the middle of a fucking _battle_ and you are bleeding out and we have to _go. Now._”

Aziraphale blinks up into Crowley’s frightened face, feeling marvelously detached. _Blood loss_, he thinks, _maybe shock_.

He licks his lips, “yes, I suppose we should.”

“Can you… you know, heal this and we get the fuck out of here?”

“Is there a bullet in there?” Aziraphale begins pulling at the blood-soaked fabric around his thigh.

“What does it matter? _Fix it_.” Crowley keeps glancing nervously over his shoulder.

“I can’t fix it if there’s a bullet in there, my dear,” he says sleepily, “it’s a foreign object.”

“_What_? Jesus _Christ_,” Crowley is rubbing at his forehead, “it doesn’t matter, we have to go—“

He scurries behind him again, links their arms and begins dragging him across the sand again.

“Why are you dragging me, Crowley?” He asks again.

“Because.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Because I don’t want to hurt your leg.”

“It’s because you can’t lift me, isn’t it?”

“Will you _shut up_ I am trying to get us out of here.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale says, looking out towards the edge of the valley, “there’s that horse I met.”

They stop abruptly.

“You met a _horse_?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale says absently, “I fixed his leg.”

“I should know better than to ask,” Crowley mumbles, and then louder, “can we ride him?”

Aziraphale swivels his head to stare up at Crowley, “you actually _want_ to ride a horse?”

“No, what I _want_ is to get the hell out of here.”

Aziraphale stares out toward the gelding with his spotted flank and the star on his forehead. He smiles at the horse, at the way the big ears flop back and forth in earnest curiosity at this being who fixed his leg.

He whistles.

The horse walks toward them, slowly, ears piqued forward.

“Come here, dear boy,” and Aziraphale doesn’t miss the sharp way in which Crowley looks down at him, “that’s a good boy.”

“Fucking hell,” Crowley mutters.

“Don’t mind him,” Aziraphale says, the horse nearly within distance to reach out and touch, “he won’t hurt you.”

Crowley is folding his arms, huffing out a resigned sigh.

“Can you give us a ride?”

The horse is sniffing the air near Aziraphale’s outstretched palm, a velvet nose butting into it. He scratches at the coarse hairs there.

“Very handsome,” he says.

Crowley, somewhere behind him, sucks his teeth.

The horse flattens his ears in response, snorting loudly.

“Yes, I know, he has to come too. But he’s okay once you know him.”

The horse exhales a hot blast of air onto his palm.

“Okay, Aziraphale _enough_. Let’s go.”

Crowley grabs at the reins and the horse flattens his ears, pulls back away from him.

“Will you _stop_.” Aziraphale snatches the reins from him and shoots him a dangerous look, “I’m so sorry, my dear. Come here.”

“Angel, we have to go,” Crowley is saying, threading his hands underneath his arms, “we have to go _now_.”

It is hard to find his feet, his left leg feeling curiously numb. It is harder still to sling himself into the saddle, Crowley pushing him up from the ground.

“Good?” He asks, tucking the foot on his wounded leg into the stirrup.

“Good,” Aziraphale says quietly, feeling very tired.

“Okay,” Crowley says, and climbs up behind him.

The gelding clearly does not enjoy having what he is sure is a predatory reptile on his back, but perhaps the presence of Aziraphale too evens it out— soothes the wrongness of it all.

One of them, Aziraphale isn’t sure which, nudges the horse into an easy cantor, the glowing red sand of the desert kicking away underfoot. Aziraphale stares down at it, at Crowley’s arms that reach around in front of him, holding the reins. There is the three-starred belt of the constellation Orion near his wrist, and the press of Crowley’s hips against his back, and a heartbeat thumping loudly between his shoulder blades.

Aziraphale can feel the steady thrumming of emotion around him, how he always does, can feel how it follows the pulses of Crowley’s heart— _love you, love you, love you— _as it keeps time with the hoof strikes on sand. A metronome, he thinks, a timepiece for traveling up hills.

_Har_, meaning hill, he thinks, and falls asleep.

* * *

Crowley is kissing him. He is kissing him and Aziraphale is kissing back, like he has always wanted, threading his hands through that copper-bright hair, pulling him close. He tastes like camp-fire and good whiskey and cinnamon, and his hands are hot as they dig into the skin by his hips.

“I love you,” he is whispering, or maybe it is Crowley who says it.

“_Angel_,” Crowley is somehow murmuring into his mouth. There are white sheets surrounding them, a long stretch of cotton bed beneath them.

“_Angel_.”

Crowley is very good at talking while kissing, laying him down flat and naked on the bed, hovering over him with those lean arms and that lean chest and those freckles like stars scattered across his body.

“Angel.”

Aziraphale wakes up, for the second time, in a tiny stone room.

He blinks.

“Crowley?”

Crowley has his head in his hands and Aziraphale is very confused at how he managed to get his clothes on so quickly. He looks up.

“Oh, thank Satan you’re awake.”

He looks tired.

“How did you get dressed so quickly?” Aziraphale asks, propping himself up on his elbows.

Crowley looks down at himself, at the dusty black clothes he has been wearing since last night, and then back up at Aziraphale. He very deliberately blinks.

“And… this isn’t— how did the bed get so small?”

“Angel…” Crowley is eyeing him strangely, the hint of a smile curling his lips, “were… were you _dreaming_?”

Aziraphale can feel the blood rising to his face.

“Is _that_ what that was?”

Crowley is rubbing a hand across his face, and Aziraphale can see his failing attempt at hiding a smile.

“Have you _never_ dreamt before?”

“I can’t say I’ve ever _slept_ before,” he looks down at Crowley’s wrist on the bed, “and I believe that’s a prerequisite to dreaming.”

He can feel it, in the air, how much Crowley wants to kiss him. He can feel the heady push of that ethereal vapor filling the air around him, much moreso than usual, well beyond the typical basin of Crowley’s endless supply of love that fills bathrooms and infirmaries, train cars, entire _deserts_.

“I believe you’re right,” he agrees softly, “maybe now you’ll understand why I love to sleep.”

_Oh, _Aziraphale thinks, and can feel the way Crowley’s heartbeat has just picked a more frantic rhythm, can feel it because it changes the way that the love he broadcasts into the air dances, moves across the room.

Crowley must be feeling it too— the love pouring out from his chest, the warm, prickling brightness that edges along his skin, the unfathomable desire to live in those single daydreams where they could kiss and touch and play. He must be feeling it, Aziraphale knows, because it is getting echoed back to him tenfold until they’re swimming in it, together.

“Maybe I’ll get into the habit,” Aziraphale says, and watches as Crowley glances at his eyes, looking all at once curious and hopeful.

“Angel,” he says, and looks down at his leg, “please fix this.”

He can see the helpless way that Crowley’s hands are flexing in his lap, the worried set of his jaw. _You really are torn up about this, aren’t you?_ He wonders, dazed.

The blood seems to be moving slowly through his body, or, perhaps, there just isn’t enough of it moving at all. He blinks down at the soaked fabric on his thigh. His leg had gone numb quite a while ago, and somewhere in his brain the part of him that has operated as a medic knows that isn’t a good sign.

“Okay,” he says, and licks his lips, thoughtful, “first we should cut the fabric off.”

“Leave that?” Crowley asks, nodding at the belt.

“Leave that,” Aziraphale says, running his fingers over the knotted leather. “This was quick thinking.”

“My bo—“ Crowley stops, flushes an intensely dark red right up to the tips of his ears, “My _friend_ is an army medic,” he says, clearing his throat, “I do listen sometimes.”

Aziraphale watches Crowley’s hand tremble as it opens his field bag. He glances between his face and hand, sleepy and dazed enough to enjoy the obvious emotional floundering.

“Is this—“ Crowley starts, pulling out the metal field scissors, “will you be okay?” He finishes softly.

“I’ll be fine,” Aziraphale says, and takes the scissors, “You’re just going to dig out the bullet and I’ll heal it up and I’ll be right as rain.”

He does not miss the way that Crowley pales in the dim light of this small room.

“You want _me_ to do it?”

Aziraphale looks up from cutting the fabric of his pant leg.

“Of course I want you to do it. I’m much too tired,” he blinks sleepily into Crowley’s shocked face, “I must’ve lost a good deal of blood.” He considers the placement of the wound, “it’s lucky I didn’t knick an artery.”

“Angel,” Crowley’s fingers are flexing in his lap again, “I don’t think I can do this.”

“Of course you can,” Aziraphale says, far too cheerfully for someone bleeding out in some transitory military housing in a desert, “if you don’t I’ll discorporate.”

“_Fuck_,” he breathes, and takes the scissors from Aziraphale’s hands.

He peels back the flap of fabric to reveal a white stretch of thigh painted in blood, and the unmistakeable entry-point of a bullet hole.

Crowley, Aziraphale decides, is looking rather green around the edges.

“So, you will take these,” Aziraphale says, finding his tweezers, “and maybe this,” he finds the scalpel with its metal cap, “and dig around in there until you hit metal, and then just pull it out.”

“I might throw up,” Crowley says, audibly swallowing.

Aziraphale sucks his teeth, rolls his eyes, “stop being dramatic. Just do it.”

He takes the tweezers from Aziraphale’s hand and looks up.

“Payback is a bitch,” Crowley says, something mischievous in his eyes, the ghost of a smile on his face. But there is no malice behind his words, and when he puts the tip of the tweezers against his skin he glances up with a worry etched into his face that Aziraphale has never seen before.

“You okay?” He breathes.

“I’m _fine_,” Aziraphale responds, putting his hand over Crowley’s, “you don’t have to be gentle with me.”

He pushes down on the metal tool in his hand, the instrument sinking into the wound. His nerves buzz with a hazy warning, painful to be sure, but not unbearable.

“How are you so okay with this?” Crowley says, and Aziraphale can see the sweat on his forehead, the way he is trying to keep his hand steady.

“High pain tolerance,” he says, flicking his gaze up to meet Crowley’s, “add it to the peculiar set of extras, I suppose.”

“Well now I know why you were so cavalier about digging around in my hip,” Crowley mutters, working his hand back and forth, “so much for all that angelic empathy.”

“I can’t help it that you’re so sensitive.”

“I am _not_ sensitive,” Crowley snaps, his hand gentle despite his voice.

Aziraphale sucks in a pained breath through his teeth as he hits a particularly alert bundle of nerves.

“_Fuck_, sorry,” Crowley breathes, and then, “I think I feel it.”

“Good,” Aziraphale says, his voice clipped, “now pull it out and try not to pull anything else out with it.”

Crowley closes his eyes and inhales unsteadily at his words, and then opens them, looking distinctly queasy, “pull it out, got it.”

The dented metal slug is a tiny thing as it exits him, and Aziraphale marvels, as he has so many times before, at how something so small could cause so much havoc.

He lets out a relieved sigh, relaxing back onto his elbows.

“Okay, it’s out, now do the thing,” Crowley says with a sort of panicked wave of his hand.

Aziraphale looks down into the open wound, at the sluggish pulse of blood coming up through it. He definitely got lucky, he thinks, and holds his hand over the opened skin.

He can feel it knitting together beneath his palm, his eyes closed, this simple act of healing somehow more draining than getting the bullet dug out of him.

Crowley is watching, he knows, because he always watches— enthralled maybe, or saddened, perhaps remembering a time when he could do this too.

“Better,” he gasps out, and looks down at the freshly healed skin. His leg was entirely numb, the skin becoming a much paler white.

“Can I untie this?” Crowley is asking, his fingers on the belt around his thigh. Aziraphale looks at him, blinks hazily.

“Yes,” he says, knowing this was the bad part.

And it is— because the feeling of blood rushing back down into his leg erupts a multitude of tiny pin-pricks, his bones aching in protest.

“Ah,” he sucks in a pained inhale, “this is rather terrible.”

“What? I thought you healed it?” Crowley looks distinctly guilty with the belt in his hands.

“I did. Just the feeling coming back,” Aziraphale flexes his foot back and forth, “It’s like being stabbed all over.”

“Can’t you stop it?” He does that same panicked hand wave and Aziraphale wonders if that’s how he used to heal things, when he was an angel.

“Nothing to heal really,” He looks down at his leg again, at the cut fabric of his military issued trouser. “I am _very_ pleased I decided to wear the uniform.”

Crowley reaches up to fiddle with a pair of glasses that he soon realizes are not there.

“You are—,” he shakes his head, “ridiculous.”

Aziraphale just waves his hand over his leg, the blood evaporating, the stains disappearing.

“If these were my _good_ clothes I don’t think I could ever stand to wear them again,” he folds the flap of fabric back down and smoothes it back to place, the fibers weaving themselves into a solid pant leg again, “I would look down and just see the blood stains.”

Crowley sits on the edge of what is clearly a military-issued cot, fixes him with an exasperated stare.

“I am feeling very tired,” Aziraphale says, leaning back until he is staring up at the roof of this strange room, “blood loss, I suppose,” he mumbles.

There is a hand that finds his on the bed, grabs at it, rubs circles into it.

“Sleep,” Crowley is muttering softly, “I’ll watch over you.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale says, his eyelids closing under an uncommon weight, “watch over me.”

* * *

Crowley is beautiful in black.

Not that Aziraphale will ever say it. Not that he will ever admit it to his face. But it doesn’t make it any less true. He is beautiful in black and it is a very good thing that he tries so hard to be cool, Aziraphale thinks, because it suits him very much.

Crowley is standing against a backdrop of unearthly purple sky, dressed in all black, like always. There is a ring around Aziraphale’s finger, and he spins it absently, eyeing the matching one on Crowley’s hand.

Aziraphale does not know where he got the flaming sword that he has been looking for all these years, but it looks good in Crowley’s hands, even if the demon clearly doesn’t know how to hold it.

“Angel,” he is whispering, because he knows how much Aziraphale loves the nickname, “I have loved you every day since that first day.”

“I know, darling,” Aziraphale is saying, and he can feel his hand threading through that beautiful hair, can see the shine of the purple sky on the smooth gold of his ring, “I have known all along.”

But something is wrong and he doesn’t understand _what_. He does not know why he is up on this high hill— they are much too high— even with their wings out. And Crowley’s wings are beautiful too— oil-black like raven-feathers that catch the light, cast it back, iridescent.

There is a small fire burning beside him and all of this feels too familiar, too similar to a vision he had once, in a desert. He looks around at the red-chalk hills and the wide sky and sees that it is the _same _desert that he walked through not that long ago, the place where he saw the end of days.

He looks down at the Valley of Jazreel. _At the place in Hebrew called Armageddon_.

The space where his heart is feels vacant, like the organ has shifted down somewhere into his pelvis or maybe as far as his feet. It is no longer in his chest, no longer _anywhere_ as he looks around and sees demons and angels wrestling in that field beneath him, a strange simulacrum to that very human dance he wishes to do with Crowley someday— wrapped up in each other on a bed or a table or any flat surface, wrapped up to the point where you cannot tell where one starts and the other begins.

And Crowley, yes, the beautiful serpent that wore human skin and walks around caring so much and trying to show so little— he is in his arms but Aziraphale is squeezing, squeezing— it’s too tight— _it’s okay, it’s okay, I’d rather it be you, when the times comes_— and the light in those limitless golden eyes, like the amber of an ageless tree, goes dark.

He closes his eyes against the terror of that image, a painting he will never be able to unsee, and then the tide of loss pulls him beneath its current.

And Aziraphale is gasping, _gasping_, because there is not enough air in his lungs or in the entire world even to quench this furious drowning. He will never breathe again, he knows— because how can you breathe without lungs, without a heart— and it took him until now to realize that the emotion that Crowley released for all those years, since the very first day, was the very thing that he has been subsisting on. Breathing in. Breathing out.

He opens his eyes, and inhales.

He can breathe again— but only just, and as his eyes focus on the dim light in this strange room he can see Crowley beside him, on the floor, having passed out at some point and breathing gently.

_He’s here_, Aziraphale thinks, but it does little to quell the furious pounding of his heart, of the gutless gasp of terror in his chest.

_He’s okay_, he tells himself, and reaches down off the cot to trace a finger around the rounded shell of his ear.

Crowley shifts in his slumber at the touch, clearly unaccustomed to having his ear caressed in the midst of sleep.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale whispers, because the sight of him sleeping there isn’t enough— he is so very still lying there, nearly motionless, and the sight of it does something strange to the rhythm of his circulatory system.

Those golden eyes flutter open, then snap fully wide as he realizes where he is, who he is with.

“Angel,” he sits up, looking groggy, “are you okay?”

Aziraphale sits up too, mirroring him, his feet swinging down onto the floor.

“I’m not sure,” he admits, and worries at his bottom lip with his teeth.

Crowley runs a hand through his hair, making it stand on end.

“Did you have a bad dream?”

“I suppose,” he says, “but it felt so _real_.”

“They often do,” Crowley says, and Aziraphale has the sense that Crowley has experienced his fair share of nightmares.

“But they aren’t,” he assures, blinking up blearily into Aziraphale’s face, “whatever happened— they aren’t real.”

_But they might be_, _someday_, he thinks.

“I don’t think I want to sleep again,” Aziraphale says.

“_Ever_?”

Aziraphale thinks about Crowley in his arms, about that small fire burning beside him, about those eyes like liquid flame.

“No,” he says, “never.”

Crowley is looking at him oddly, as if to say, _but there are good dreams too—_

And there are, Aziraphale remembers— remembers how Crowley tasted like campfire and cinnamon— but it’s not enough. Because he would rather have nothing than lose everything.

“I think,” Aziraphale says slowly, “that I should not have come here,” and threads his fingers through his hair.

“Hey,” Crowley is whispering, “it’s okay.”

_Is that the future? Is that where this leads?_ He wonders, closing his eyes into his palms, his fingers twisting at the short curls of his hair.

“Angel,” Crowley is saying, and then there is a hand taking his, pulling it away from his face, “it was just a dream.”

But it wasn’t, not really. Because Aziraphale knows that an angel who loves a demon is a _dead angel_ and a demon who loves an angel might be something worse.

He wants to feel something, _do _something. Feel something other than the mindless pull of his body as if along an invisible string. The ineffable plan, as much as he believes in it, stretches him in ways he wishes it didn’t.

_We should be more careful_, he thinks, and remembers Crowley turning away from him in Kobarid, remembers him smoking outside of a hospital in London, mouthing words around a cigarette like he was afraid of what would come spilling out were it not there.

_To hell with it,_ Aziraphale thinks, _if this is the plan anyway_.

“Crowley,” he says, and he can hear the voice of his demon, his friend, his lover from all the way back in his tiny bathroom in London: _really angel, anytime._

“Yes?” Crowley is saying, with that purple edge of a black eye making the gold of his left iris electric in comparison.

“Could you—,” he licks his lips, staring down into that suddenly awake and expressive face, like Crowley knows what he is about to ask, like he can taste with that snake tongue the molecules of desire that Aziraphale is emitting from his skin, “could you touch me?”

He has seen men move like this before— like they have been without food or without water for far too long— how they pull at the edges of themselves in ravishing disbelief.

“_Yes_,” Crowley says, emphatic, “tell me what you want.”

But his fingers are already on his knees, running up along the length of his thighs like he has just been waiting for permission all along, as if he cannot feel the rivers of want that slick through Aziraphale’s veins.

“Everything,” Aziraphale breathes, “make me forget it.”

Crowley’s eyes find his in the dimming light of this tiny room, curious and confused but willing, _always willing_, to be whatever Aziraphale needs him to be.

There are fingers at the button his trousers, unsteady and unpracticed, their eyes locked together as he fumbles blindly at the fly.

“I’ll be careful,” he is saying, and the black of his pupils blows wide, “I promise I’ll be careful.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale says, and Crowley wraps his hand around him, the blood redirecting between his legs, “_please_.”

He wants him on the floor, against a wall, in the bathtub at the bookshop. He wants that skinny, bony, pale human form stretched over him and under him in every earthly configuration they can think of. But mostly, right now, he wants that brilliant mouth with those sharp incisors and that inhuman tongue that so very often makes Crowley slur his words.

“Can you?” He is asking, and Crowley is already pressing kisses against the length of him, “would you mind very much?”

“I told you already you stupid angel,” Crowley is breathing, “_anytime_,” and then runs his tongue up the aching length of him.

Aziraphale’s head rolls back, his eyes closing as Crowley sucks him into the velvet heat of his mouth. It’s hot— infernally so— and Aziraphale wonders if that’s just the heat of a human mouth or the standard temperature of a demonic one.

There are curious hands scooting him forward, pulling him until his is very nearly off the bed. And then Crowley is inching his shoulders underneath Aziraphale’s knees, hitching them up around his ears.

He shouldn’t like this, he thinks, shouldn’t like the way it makes the rounded softness of his belly more apparent, the way it makes his thighs take up more space— but Crowley just fists his hands into the back of his thigh like he wishes they were bigger, and Aziraphale forgets to care.

“Crowley,” he can hear himself gasping out, and his voice sounds foreign to his ears, “_yes_.”

The mouth pulls away from him, a hand taking its place. It is stroking up, pulling down, an undulating rhythm of infinite care.

He is pushing up against the underside of his thighs, gentling him back until Aziraphale is propped up on his elbows, his heels skirting the edge of the bed.

“Good?” Crowley is asking, out of breath, because he is peppering kisses against the inside of his thighs, the crease of his leg, down to the stretch of skin behind his balls.

“_Very good_,” Aziraphale moans, his eyes opening to stare mindlessly at the white of the ceiling above him, knowing distantly that humans did this but not ever having considered that it would happen to him.

“Yes, oh— just there—_” _he says around the lack of air in his throat. Crowley’s tongue is licking at him, _lathing _at him, everywhere except where he wants it.

“_Crowley_,” he finally bites out, tired of the teasing, “_please_.”

He can feel Crowley smiling against his thigh, the devious thing— and then suddenly there is a tongue at his entrance, flicking out to taste him. “_Oh_.”

The pleasure is graceless, immense. He gasps into the room, hands fisting in the thin cotton of the bed.

“Crowley—,” he moans, but it sounds like a whine.

That infernal tongue was awakening nerve endings he did not realize he had— pressing, licking— sucking kisses into a part of his body that he very seldom thought about but now would not be able to forget.

“More, oh darling, it’s so good,” he moans, and then that tongue presses inside of him, just slightly—

“Oh—,” he breathes, his body twisting up tight under the pleasure, “—_fuck_.”

Crowley startles, pulls back, looks up at him.

The gold of his eyes is shining and disbelieving— _awed_.

“Did you just—“

“_No_.”

“Yes, you—“

“I _didn’t_.”

Crowley smiles, bites his lip, and something about the pure white of that sharp incisor digging into his skin lights a fire in Aziraphale’s veins.

He pulls himself up— feet back on the floor— threads his hands into Crowley’s hair, feeling powerful and dangerous, and guides him back into the cradle of his thighs.

“_Don’t stop_,” he says, and Crowley moans against his skin.

“I hope you know,” Crowley is saying, pressing wet kisses onto his cock, “that I endeavor to make you say that word— unff,” he sucks the tip of him into his mouth, teasing, letting go, “as often as possible.”

“Good luck—,” Aziraphale gasps, squeezing the hair between his fingers, “—with that.”

And then Crowley’s lips are on him again, swallowing and pulling with his throat, moaning around the heat of him. He can feel movement against the bed, and Aziraphale looks down to see Crowley’s arm working at the edge of his pants, tugging them down as best he can until he can see the leaking length of his cock springing free.

“Darling,” he breathes, watching Crowley’s hand squeeze himself, “_more_.”

Crowley is brilliant, _brilliant_. The gold of his eyes and the flaming incandescence of his hair, _everywhere_, like the whole of his skin could not contain the brilliance of his being.

He wraps his arm around that copper head between his thighs and presses the forehead into his belly, gasping out his name in this dark room that he does not know, as if it is some other room, some other place where they can exist outside of themselves.

“_Oh_,” he exhales, and can feel Crowley’s arm jerking himself off, quickly— always so quickly— like how he rode horses and how he jumped to conclusions and how his mouth moved quicker than his brain. He would have to teach him one of these days to slow down, to feel the individual electrons moving on skin, to stretch out the pleasures of just _being_.

“_Yes_,” he breathes, closes his eyes against Crowley’s mouth doing those indescribable things— how his tongue could wrap itself around him like this and how his throat could open to swallow him down. _No gag reflex_, he thinks, because he can feel the back of his throat, the caress of him swallowing.

Crowley is moaning, moaning, like he cannot get enough, cannot get him deep enough despite the bottoming out of both their respective bodies. Aziraphale wonders dimly if this is why he has so seldomly seen Crowley eat, if this is why he is a mere slip of a demon— because he doesn’t hunger for food and doesn’t require calories but instead thirsts for Aziraphale, for sex, for whatever this connection is between them.

“Crowley,” he gasps, opening his eyes to see that pale body folded on the floor between his legs, like that time before, in his bathroom— kneeling in supplication. And it isn’t a sight he thinks he will ever get over, this hellfire lick of a demon who defied God and regularly defied Hell but was somehow willing, always willing, to kneel before Aziraphale.

_Love you_, he thinks.

_Love you_, it echoes back.

And Aziraphale has been loved by grace, has felt the hand of God herself, but it is nothing, _nothing_ like this.

Because Crowley has loved him without limits, without judgement, despite anything he has ever said or has ever done, has somehow answered to that call that echoes up from their guts like instinct. This is animal, he thinks, this is _human_.

“Crowley,” he is saying, tugging urgently at that copper-fine hair, “darling, I’m—”

And Crowley answers back with a moan, pulling him closer.

He can see the hand moving between Crowley’s thighs quicken, then tighten, then still, his opposite hand squeezing infinitesimally tighter around his cock in aching sympathy— and that’s all he needs to see before there’s that familiar cathodic charge that threads upwards and out from the center of his thighs, every muscle squeezing paralytic.

“_Crowley_,” he breathes, as his body stops its rhythmic pulsing, comes down from the chemical high. He reaches down and brushes the long bangs of red hair back from his face.

Crowley is just resting against his thigh, his eyes closed, catching his breath.

He looks peaceful here, relaxed at last. They sit in stunned silence for a comfortable moment, the seconds stretching between them.

“You really couldn’t lift me, huh?”

Crowley cracks open a yellow gold eye and fixes it on him, his cheek still pressed into his leg.

“_That’s_ what you have to say right now?”

Aziraphale looks down at the indent of his navel, how the skin was soft and white and _full_. He wiggles a bit into the bed beneath him.

“Don’t,” Crowley says.

Aziraphale glances at him sharply, “I didn’t say anything.”

“Not _yet_,” he says, and closes his eyes again, “but I can tell you were about to say something stupid.”

“I—“

“I like you soft,” he murmurs into his thigh, looking for all the world like he was about to fall asleep there, “now shut up.”

“I was _going_ to ask you something,” Aziraphale inhales and straightens up and Crowley peels open his eyes again.

“Yess?”

He is hissing again and Aziraphale knows that means he’s tired.

“Did you steal my tartan?”

“_Excuse_ me?”

Crowley peels his cheek away from his thigh.

“In… in Scotland,” Aziraphale blinks, “with the Jacobites.”

He can always tell when Crowley wishes that he is wearing glasses, because his hands do that strange flailing motion as if to push them up higher on his face and then abort midway as he realizes that they aren’t there.

Aziraphale can see the pale column of his throat move as he swallows.

“No,” he mumbles, “mine had _red_ in it.”

“Ah,” Aziraphale says, and rubs a thumb across that sharp cheekbone, “of course.”

“You never answered me, by the way,” Crowley says, and blinks up into his eyes.

“Hm?” Aziraphale hums, running his fingers over the rounded ear.

“Why did you follow me here?”

Aziraphale stops, looks him in the eye, his hand falling down into the space between them.

“Because—” he starts, and then licks his lips, trying not to think about those red-chalk hills— _har_ just meaning hill, he reminds himself— tries not to think about the future, tries not to rush it away— like Crowley always going so fast— he needed it slow, _slow_. Because if things were slow that meant more time before the inevitable end. It meant more time like this in dark rooms where they could be alone.

“Because,” he says again, _because wither thou goest, I will go_.

He can feel his eyebrows knitting together, and he has a sudden striking empathy for how Crowley must feel, all the time— the words strangling themselves dead in his throat and tasting foreign in his mouth.

“I don’t know,” he admits, because he cannot find the language to spell out what he felt in the desert and in his dream, what he felt that pulled him like gravity to wherever Crowley is.

There is a hand weaving up beneath his thigh to find his palm on the bed, squeezing it in reassurance. Because if there is one thing that Crowley understands it is _this_— the inability to wrap feelings up in words.

“It’s okay,” Crowley is saying, and then rests his chin on the angel’s knee, “I would’ve done the same.”

“You would have?” Aziraphale asks, watching the memories of the Bastille flash across Crowley’s eyes.

“I would have,” he says, and presses his face back into the skin of Aziraphale’s thigh.

_Intreat me not to leave thee,_ Aziraphale thinks and threads his fingers through that copper hair like a metal diadem, _or to return from following after thee._

He cups his hands beneath that sharp jaw, tilts the finely boned face to look at him— all of him, the face that was there at the beginning in the garden and the face that would be there at the end, on that hill.

_For wither thou goest, I will go._

**Author's Note:**

> the passage Aziraphale is quoting is Ruth verses 1:16 and part of 1:17. these are the lines in the King James bible:
> 
> "1:16 And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: 1:17 Where thou diest, I will die, and there will I be buried..."
> 
> The lines he quotes from the Book of Revelation are 19:12 and 20:1, respectively. 
> 
> OH! And I am absolutely quoting the incomparable Richard Siken at the “an angel who loves a demon is a dead angel” line. Because his poetry guts me and I couldn’t get that line about “a boy who likes boys is a dead boy” out of my head.  

> 
> as always, come talk to me on [Tumblr](https://racketghost.tumblr.com)!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Wither Thou Goest, I Will Go](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22043608) by [Pyracantha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pyracantha/pseuds/Pyracantha)


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